Remembering all the fallen on Memorial Day -- May 25, 2017 column

By MARSHA MERCER

For most of us, Memorial Day is the unofficial start of summer, a long weekend of cookouts, beach trips and sales. It didn’t start out this way.

On Decoration Day, as the holiday was first called, sorrow was still achingly fresh. We were a country of 31 million people in 1860 -- 22 million in the North and 9 million in the South, including 4 million slaves. Estimates of the lives lost in the Civil War range from 620,000 to 850,000.  

In the wake of the devastation, women in the South and in the North flocked to local cemeteries to decorate soldiers’ graves with spring flowers. Commerce ceased on Decoration Day as people took time to think and grieve. And yet the hard nub of bitterness persisted.

Arlington National Cemetery was founded in 1864 to bury Union dead on 200 acres at Robert E. Lee’s plantation on a hill overlooking Washington D.C. Although 

Confederate soldiers were also buried there, family members of the Confederates were not allowed to decorate their loved ones’ graves and sometimes even were denied entrance, according to the cemetery’s website.

Then, in 1901 in an attempt at reconciliation, hundreds more Confederate soldiers were reburied in a special section of the cemetery. Their headstones had an unusual pointed top to distinguish them from the rounded Union headstones. Southerners said the point would “keep Yankees from sitting on them.” 

A Confederate Monument was authorized, paid for by the United Daughters of the Confederacy and built by a prominent sculptor and Confederate veteran, Moses Ezekiel.

President Woodrow Wilson, first Southern president elected since the war, spoke at the dedication ceremony on June 4, 1914, a day after the 106^th anniversary of the birthday of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy.

“My privilege is this, ladies and gentlemen: To declare this chapter in the history of the United States closed and ended, and I bid you turn with me with your faces to the future, quickened by the memories of the past, but with nothing to do with the contests of the past, knowing, as we have shed our blood upon opposite sides, we now face and admire one another,” Wilson said.

The Virginia-born president’s words were more an aspiration than an accurate account.

The ornate monument extols a romanticized version of the Old South with 32 life-size figures, urns, shields, Biblical symbols and a Latin inscription – “Victrix causa diis placuit sed victa Catoni.”

The phrase from the poet Lucan translates as “The victorious cause was pleasing to the gods, but the losing side (or cause) pleases Cato,” roughly equating Lincoln with the tyrant Julius Caesar and the Confederacy with Cato who fought Caesar valiantly but lost.   

Americans are still struggling with how to remember the Civil War. New Orleans has taken the lead by removing four Confederate monuments. First to go was the most appalling – an obelisk to the Battle of Liberty Place, honoring a white supremacist group that killed members of the city’s integrated police force and state militia in 1874. 

Three other monuments -- honoring Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and P.G.T. Beauregard and Jefferson Davis – were also removed until suitable locations can be found.

“There is a difference between the remembrance of history and reverence of it,” New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu said.

That distinction – that we can and should remember the past without idolizing it – is important as we try again as a country to move forward.  

One way may be to shift our focus from the famous figures on pedestals to the forgotten fallen, those whose names are inscribed on crumbling monuments on courthouse greens across the country.

On Memorial Day – a federal holiday since 1971 and the Vietnam War -- we honor all Americans who died in military service. Just as in the Vietnam era, during the Civil War a draft swept many into service. In the 1860s, those who could afford it could hire a substitute.   

This isn’t to say we overlook, or give a pass to, the Cult of the Lost Cause, the concerted attempt after the Civil War “to rewrite history to hide the truth, which is that the Confederacy was on the wrong side of humanity,” as Landrieu said. Not at all.

Communities need to decide which statues should be moved and where they should go. But cemeteries are a proper place for grandiose monuments to dead people and dead ideas. 

©2017 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Confederates in U.S. Capitol -- off their pedestals? June 25, 2015 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell isn’t alone in rethinking the role of Confederate icons in 21^st Century America.

The Kentucky Republican said Tuesday that a statue of Kentucky-born Jefferson Davis, the first and only president of the Confederacy, may be out of place in his home state’s Capitol Rotunda.   

A better spot could be the Kentucky history museum, McConnell told reporters. Some state politicians agree, but it’s hardly a done deal.

New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu says it’s time for his city to remove a prominent statue of Robert E. Lee, and a pastor there wants one of Davis removed. Students at the University of Texas at Austin have demanded the removal of a Davis statue on campus to a museum,“so it could be learned from instead of revered.”

The carnage in Charleston brought a backlash against the Confederate battle flag that now invites us to rethink not just symbols but how we present our past.

Cities, counties and states are struggling with what we should do about streets and statues that honor Confederate heroes. A few, like Monument Avenue in Richmond, Va., are designated a National Historic Landmark and listed on the National Register of Historic Places as architecturally significant to the entire nation.

It’s one thing to see Confederates honored at home but quite another to find their monuments in a place of national honor in the U.S. Capitol. And yet several of the 100 statues that states have donated to the National Statuary Hall Collection over the years memorialize Confederate soldiers and sympathizers. Not one represents an African American.

National Statuary Hall has its roots in the Civil War. When the House outgrew its old Chamber, a representative from Vermont proposed in 1864 that each state select citizens worthy of “lasting commemoration” and send their statuary likenesses to the Capitol.

Each of the 50 states choose two figures “illustrious for their historic renown” and honor them in marble or bronze. Confederate heroes on display include:  Davis of Mississippi, Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens of Georgia, commanding Gen. Robert E. Lee of Virginia, rebel hero and Reconstruction foe Wade Hampton of South Carolina, and governor and military leader Zebulon Baird Vance of North Carolina.

Virginia donated statues of favorite sons George Washington and Lee, over Union veterans’ objections to Lee.

By 1933, Statuary Hall was overcrowded. Statues stood three deep in some places, and there were concerns the floor would not support more weight. So, the statues are spread throughout the Capitol complex. Washington’s statue is in the Rotunda, Lee’s in the Crypt.    

Congress commissioned a statue of Rosa Parks, the first full-length statue of a black person in the Capitol, and it was dedicated in Statuary Hall in 2013. Congress-commissioned busts of Martin Luther King Jr. and Sojourner Truth also are in the Capitol. A statue of Frederick Douglass, donated by the District of Columbia, is in the Capitol Visitor Center.  

Since 2000, Congress has allowed states to remove and replace statues, and a handful of states have retired old soldiers. Some have installed modern icons – Dwight Eisenhower, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan. 

In 2009, Alabama removed the statue of J.L.M. Curry and replaced it with one of Helen Keller. Curry was a secessionist and Confederate officer who later became an education reformer. The Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia is named for Curry, who is buried at Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond.  

Alabama’s other statue is of Confederate Gen. Joseph Wheeler. He at least later served the United States in the war with Spain.

Ohio is replacing former Gov. William Allen, who backed slavery and criticized Lincoln, with Thomas Edison.

Rep. Kathy Castor, D-Fla., wants her state to remove the statue of Confederate Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith from the Capitol and replace it with someone who has made more lasting, positive contributions. Florida’s other statue is of Dr. John Gorrie, the father of air conditioning.

So far, Mississippi’s senators are defending Davis’s place in the U.S. Capitol. Mississippi’s second statue is of Confederate Col. and white supremacist James Zachariah George.

With all that’s happened in the last 150 years, it’s time we updated our heroes. It’s time for states to bring their Confederates home and put the statues in museums where they belong. The war should end at last.   

©2015 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.